LISTEN: Columbia Cancels Commencement After Reporters Get Trapped in ‘Frozen Zone’

Gwynne Hogan, senior reporter for THE CITY,  joins hosts Christina Greer and Harry Siegel to discuss what it’s been like reporting on the NYPD from inside the “frozen zone” it established inside and around the Columbia campus, the NYPD’s wild new messaging machine that’s pumping out  flashy action videos and angry tweets while reporters are stuck glimpsing the action through a glass darkly, and much more.

That includes the City Council’s attempts to call out top cops’ wildly aggressive new messaging attacks on public officials and journalists.

“It’s my understanding that they have almost no power and that if they write a law that requires something, Mayor Eric Adams doesn’t have to implement it, as we’ve learned,” says Hogan.

“I don’t really see what the check on this is if the boss is still okay with it, unless there is an election in which [the police chiefs] get a new boss.”

And Hogan digs into how the campus encampments, and the police response to them, do and do not, match up with the George Floyd protests in 2020, when the police had a much more complicated with Mayor Bill de Blasio than they do now with Mayor Eric Adams.

Then, there were protests popping up everywhere. Now, “It’s much easier to [police] people who are literally camping. They’re not going anywhere. They’re physically in one location.”

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